While geoengineering isn’t really something that has been tried yet, it’s actual purpose if done would be to address climate change. Albiet, not really prevention but more in a canceling out some of the symptoms sense.

Tbf assuming South America is just kinda ours to mess with or else just forgetting about it is a pretty common thing for the US to do, it tracks

What if it was a platonic love potion?

Honestly, it started sooner I think, or more to the point, it’s had this sort of tendency lurking in the background for it’s whole history to lesser and greater extents, the last few decades until the current one just being something of a lower period that makes this stand out by contrast.

After all, these aren’t exactly the first concentration camps built in or by the United States, the country has a history with forced labor and institutionalized racial supremacy so severe that the country literally split itself apart over it at one point, and it’s founding and expansion to it’s current borders involved the genocide of those already living on the land in question.

The silver lining to all this I guess, if you can call it that, is that this history and the fact we even had something of a relative lul in all this, implies that as bleak as things look, the racism, nativism, and disenfranchisement can be squashed down again, because it’s been done here before.

The context of who does a thing and how they’d be likely to do it matters; a surgeon cutting into someone with a scalpel can help heal them, but an untrained idiot with the same scalpel is likely to make the situation even worse than if the surgery hadn’t even been tried.

Though I don’t agree with the deportation bit, I view unwilling deportation as cruel, and taking his obscene pile of wealth away would also remove most of his ability to negatively effect society anyway (and if it didn’t, then him being physically in a different country probably wouldn’t help much either, or else would be pushing the problem onto them instead of solving it.)

You could also shoehorn the American two party political system into this

To be fair, indigenous in this sort of context usually refers to a colonial state where the ruling group is different from the one there before a colonial empire got there. I don’t usually see it used for populations that haven’t been subject to conquest and occupation like that within the last millenia or so, even if it could technically fit, it’d be a bit redundant.

Though if the history of, say, Ireland is any indication, historically when white Europeans end up in that kind of position they haven’t faired much better.

Ironically, the closest thing I can think of to this concept actually applying in humans would be “free” internet stuff that is actually funded by advertising and personal data harvesting, which is unrelated to socialism but does describe the place that original post looks to have come from.

Because our elections system is fundamentally broken in such a way that creating or promoting something other than the existing two makes the side you like least more likely to win. As such, unless you can get literally the entire base of one of the major parties to switch to you in the span of a single election cycle, “asking for something more than the lesser of two evils” has mostly the same practical consequences as “asking for the greater evil”.

This largely breaks the premise of democracy, of course, because the two main parties don’t have to follow “the will of the people”, they just have to look slightly better in the eyes of their base than the other party. The way to fix it would be to greatly reform our election system, but that’s difficult to do (admittedly not entirely for bad reasons, it probably would not be ideal for authoritarians to make changes to that for example), and made worse by the fact that both parties benefit from the current system vs one where even more competition can exist.

That latter point means that what it would really take, is first usurping control of one of the existing parties from those that currently run it, and then getting those newcomers into enough power at a national level to get election reform done. That’s not a terribly likely path to work out, I’m afraid, but it’s probably all we’ve got short of an actual violent revolution (which have a high risk of failing or getting co-opted by authoritarians, and in any event are a lot harder to start than some people on the internet seem to think they are). This is probably why the establishment democrats hate this guy so much, despite him only running for mayor (of a large city admittedly, but still, not exactly president or anything). Popular candidates from outside their established group are exactly the kind of thing that you would need to start this process, and if successful that group would lose much of their power.

He isn’t the only winner of that prize to be involved in war crimes, to be fair.

I mean, wouldn’t physical activity (and cooperative group based physical activity at that) during one’s formative years make one more likely to make a useful soldier, not less?

If that were true, Disney and a number of other large companies would not exist.

I would imagine the Iranian government or an affiliated organization like that would have better access to the internet at the moment than the average citizen. A social media influence campaign doesn’t even have to be physically based within the country running it, technically. I’m not saying whether Iran is or isn’t running bots or to what extent, because I don’t know that, but I would think that, given that their enemies are doing it, it would make quite a lot of sense for them to do so as well.

I’m not sure that modern political terminology, especially with regards to something like socialism, really fits someone who predates even the invention of those words. Sure, you can find similarities, but you can’t always expect consistency with it in all their positions if the person in question got to those positions in a very different manner.

I’ve been pretty happy with how the instance I use has been run thus far, but it is focused around furries, so it won’t be something most people outside that subculture like I expect. Still, the fandom is big enough that someone in it looking for an instance might look at this thread, so I mention it anyway.

The issue I can see with that model is that, depending on how exactly it is implemented, it might end up spilling into places that involve people who were doing nothing unreasonable. For example, suppose a criminal makes a pipe gun, or a 3-d printed one, and uses that in a crime. If we’re always looking down the chain, do we also hold responsible whoever sold them the pipes, or the printer, or other machining tools? The easy enough answer is to except steps that don’t usually have to do with firearms I suppose (where the people involved would not generally have reason to expect the purchaser is using what they buy for those purposes), but in taking that obvious step, one would create a situation where acquiring guns through less traceable and safe means becomes easier than the ways that can be tracked, which is rarely a good thing if you want rules to actually be followed.

Personally, I think that, rather than the guns themselves, the focus of gun control measures should be on the ammunition they fire. It doesn’t last as long as a gun potentially can, and is disposable, meaning that the large number of guns already in circulation poses less of an issue, and is harder to manufacture at home due to the requirement for explosive chemicals. Further, most “legitimate” civilian uses for a gun either don’t require all that much of it (like hunting), or can be done in a centralized location that can monitor use (like sport target shooting at a professionally run shooting range).

What I would do, is put a very restrictive limit on how much ammunition a given person may purchase in a given year, and only allow exceptions to that limit if the person can provide proof that an equivalent amount of their existing allotment has been fired, returns old ammunition for exchange, or purchases the extra at a licensed range that as a condition of the license must monitor patrons and ensure those bullets are either fired or refunded before the shooter leaves.

I wonder if Putin is jealous about having to share…

Other than maybe one tiny corner of China, where are you finding manicheans in this day and age?

Technically not, since a lack of intelligence doesn’t necessarily imply that something said by a given person is wrong (else an unintelligent person could make things more likely to be wrong by saying something, or would be unable to say that thing if it is true.)

Ron DeSantis isn’t a lemmy mod, to my knowledge.